13 articles on cdn — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
A streaming service with a 10,000 hour library and a million viewing hours a month costs about 33,680 dollars on AWS, and 89 percent of that is CDN egress. Here is the breakdown, and why bitrate is the only number that really matters.
Video is the heaviest thing most companies put on a network. One hour of 1080p delivered to one viewer moves several gigabytes, and the per-GB meter does the rest. Here is the cost per viewer, worked out.
Origin shield adds a second caching layer between edge locations and your origin. It costs per request and saves origin load, but it only pays for itself under particular traffic shapes. Here is when.
CloudFront price classes let you exclude the most expensive edge locations, trading global reach for a lower per-GB rate. Price Class 100 serves only North America and Europe at the cheapest rates. Here is how the classes change your bill.
Serving files straight from S3 or a load balancer charges full egress rates on every byte; a CDN caches content at the edge, cutting origin egress and often charging less per GB. The break-even depends on cache hit ratio and traffic. Here is the math.
A content delivery network bills mostly for data transfer out and requests, and the rates vary by provider and region. Here is how CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, and Azure CDN compare, and how to keep CDN cost predictable.
CloudFront bills for data transfer out, requests, and optional features, and the biggest savings come from raising cache hit ratio, choosing the right price class, and using commitments. Here is a complete guide to optimizing CloudFront cost.
A CDN's cost hinges on cache hit ratio: cache hits serve from the edge cheaply, while misses hit your origin, incurring origin egress and compute. Raising the hit ratio cuts both CDN and origin cost. Here is how.
CloudFront, Azure Front Door, and Google Cloud CDN price content delivery similarly, egress to users (tiered by region) plus requests, with free origin-to-CDN transfer. The cheapest depends on traffic geography and volume, and a CDN usually lowers total cost.
Front Door Standard has a modest base fee plus usage; Premium costs several times more but bundles managed WAF rules, bot protection, and Private Link. Paying for Premium features you do not use is the overspend. Here is how to choose.
Cloud CDN bills cache egress to users (tiered by region), cache fill from the origin, and a small per-request lookup fee. A high cache-hit ratio lowers both origin load and cost. Here is the breakdown and how to raise hit ratio.
CloudFront has no fixed fee, you pay for data transfer out to viewers (tiered by region and volume) and per-request charges. Transfer from AWS origins to CloudFront is free, which is why a CDN often lowers your total bill. Here is the breakdown.
Azure CDN is pure caching billed per GB egress with no base fee; Front Door adds load balancing and WAF for a monthly base plus requests. Here's which to use and why cache hit ratio drives the bill.